All the Colors of the Dark

Patch ignores Saint and skips school. She receives an award for her courage from the police and gives the money to the Macauleys, stuffing it in their mailbox. Determined to rekindle her friendship with Patch, she follows him to the public library where he is searching for missing girls in the records. He stole a neighbor’s car to arrive there, and she arranges for the keys to be found in the street, hoping no one will realize Patch did it.

Patch finds several past-due bills and realizes that they are out of money. He begins to work his mother’s night custodian job. While working, he encounters Sammy and his art gallery. He steals some supplies and starts trying to paint Grace. Misty begins meeting him after school and trying to feed him things she made in a cooking class. They are all horrible, and he chokes them down reluctantly, but he and Misty strike up a tentative friendship. That friendship is solidified when Chuck tries to bully Patch, and Misty hits him over the head.

Patch continues to withdraw from Saint, which disturbs her. He is suspended from school for fighting and steals his neighbor’s car again to search for more missing girls. He meets with Callie’s father, hoping that she is Grace, but is disappointed. Sammy accuses him of stealing paper and fires him. In a rage, Patch throws his crumpled drawings of Grace at Sammy and leaves.

Misty invites him to dinner with his family, and Saint helps him get ready and then watches him leave her at the corner. Meanwhile, Jimmy watches Saint.

The dinner at the Meyers is awkward but friendly. After dinner, in the yard, Patch tells Misty that they are in different worlds and should stay there. He thinks that she will stop bringing him food.

Sammy drags him into the art gallery and gives him a room and some supplies. He tells him that everything is a loan and that he will keep an account of what Patch owes him. While he insults Patch’s drawings, he believes that he has some talent. Patch questions why Sammy is helping him, and Sammy says it is because he saved Misty. Though this is not revealed until later, her mother, Mary, was Sammy’s college sweetheart, but her family intervened, and she married Franklin instead.

For months, Patch labors over the painting until Sammy declares it finished, whether it looks like Grace. Sammy makes him quit cleaning and lets him start working at the gallery. Though the mysterious tab keeps accumulating, he also buys Patch new clothes and feeds him. When he finishes the painting, they take it to the police station, and Sammy has them photocopy it. He then displays it in the gallery, calling it Grace No. 1. Misty stops by and tells Patch she misses him and that no one looks at her like he does. Patch imagines painting her and thinks that no color in the world would be sufficient.

Norma worries over Saint, telling her that Patch is not her child and responsibility. She tells Saint that she will go to college and Patch may never recover and that she is worried about him but wants better for Saint. She makes Saint go to Misty’s birthday party, telling her that Patch will be there and that maybe he will remember that he didn’t lose everything.

Norma’s friend who does the makeup at the funeral parlor helps Saint get ready for the party, though Saint protests that it is ridiculous. Once there, Misty is crushed to realize that Patch is not with Saint, and Saint realizes that she was only invited in hopes that he would come. In a moment of shame, she begs Misty not to take him, telling her that he is all she has. However, Patch’s arrival interrupts them, and Misty goes to him.

Jimmy, who is also there, asks Saint for a dance, and she accepts. In the garden, Misty and Patch dance, and she tells him that her only wish for her birthday was to dance with the boy who saved her life.

Patch takes a job at the mines and leaves school. He continues to date Misty. Their teenage romance bemuses her parents, but they tolerate it. He also continues meeting with the families of missing girls, hoping that one of them might be Grace. He paints the girls and has Sammy send the paintings to their families. However, Callie’s father sends the painting back, refusing it, and Sammy hangs it in the gallery. Sammy decides to have a show and sell some of Patch’s paintings. Patch confides in him that he feels like he’s killing time and doesn’t know what he’s doing with his life, nor with Misty.

Meanwhile, Saint continues doing well in school and playing piano. She gets into Dartmouth but tells her grandmother that she doesn’t want to leave home or her. On weekends, she works at the public library, writing coroners and trying to investigate Aaron. She has given up on watching Tooms, deciding that he is not involved with Grace’s disappearance, though she knows he is hiding something.

At the art show, Saint allows Jimmy to accompany her, finally giving in to his pleading and her grandmother’s persuasion. Norma buys her a painting Patch did of a white house Grace described, and she hangs it above her piano.

Saint is in the pharmacy when she runs into Ivy, who is disorderly and insisting that she needs pills. Saint looks and sees a list of Tooms’s refills and takes them on impulse, seeing that the pharmacy refilled the sleeping pills the day after Patch disappeared.

Norma helps her dress for prom with Jimmy, but Saint abandons prom and goes to Tooms’s house instead. Nix intercepts her, trying to take her back. She leaps out of his car and runs to the back of Tooms’s land, where there is a little cellar. Inside, she discovers a bloody mattress and is horrified.

Franklin, Misty’s father, offers Patch a huge check to break up with her so that she will go to Harvard and have a future. After prom, Patch does so and leaves her sobbing in the front yard of her house.